


Here are Your Choices

by Angramainyus



Series: things you love that do not love you back [2]
Category: Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types, Rockman.EXE | Mega Man Battle Network
Genre: AIs Having Emotions and Behaving Badly, Agender Character, Artificial Intelligence, Comes with the Territory of A Crash Course In Destruction and Murder, Downward Mental Spiral, Gen, Post-Alpha Forte is A Mess, Pre-Canon, Serenade Disagrees with Mass Murder, Truly Excessive Amounts of Canon-Typical Violence, Unreliable POV, When In Doubt Destroy Things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-08-07 09:37:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7710115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angramainyus/pseuds/Angramainyus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lower levels of the network that wound under and over and through the human world had grown fast. Its true dimensions was magnitudes greater than the surface network stretched over it miles above. </p><p>Attempts by humans that police the growth had been aborted and confined to the surface of the network many years before in light of the simple fact that the network’s growth was no longer something that could mandated, not by its creators nor by its users. Every day, more information was added. Every day, new sites were created, new accounts used, then summarily abandoned in the matter of hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. this is the house that built me

**Author's Note:**

> It's been quite some time since I updated this, hasn't it? My deepest apologies, readers! I finished up a few of the next chapters in this series around a year ago, but I never got around to feeling up to the task of uploading them and left them languishing in the back of my computer folders for ages. 
> 
> Also I got busy with other projects. Still, I wanted to come back and finish this series the best I could sooner or later. Now looks like a good time to do so.
> 
> Much thanks goes out to [AngelLeriel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelLeriel/pseuds/AngelLeriel) for betaing this chapter for me.
> 
> (If you haven't already, I would recommend reading the previous [fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1896489/chapters/4087950) in this series. It's not strictly necessary if you don't have the time for it and already know the scope of Forte's tragic™ backstory, but it would help.)

**19.**

The lower levels of the network that wound under and over and through the human world had grown fast. Its true dimensions was magnitudes greater than the surface network stretched over it miles above. Attempts by humans that police the growth had been aborted and confined to the surface of the network many years before in light of the simple fact that the network’s growth was no longer something that could mandated, not by its creators nor by its users. Every day, more information was added. Every day, new sites were created, new accounts used, then summarily abandoned in the matter of hours.

Byte by byte it swelled.

The network generated massive amounts of electronic debris—terabytes of junk data, wayward signals, unused system registries, broken battle chip data, now-useless links, outdated information, shells of deleted websites, ghost navi-core data, there had to be somewhere for it to go. Data cannot be destroyed. Not truly. Not on the network.

However, it could be lost. It could be hidden. It could be discarded, broken apart into neat little fragments. Easier to handle that way. Cram more information into less space. It had to go somewhere eventually.

And so, subsequently it all flowed downward to what was below the surface plane.

To be dumped into the Undernet.

(Ah, the Undernet. The vast, sprawling underside of the network.)

After bypassing the Undernet’s upper network of paneled pathways, covered in the glow of synthetic lights, chunks of the data converged into solid here, congesting circuits. Cubes and triangles with sharp edges and straight lines. Wastelands, windswept deserts with sharp spikes stabbing upward, loops and warped twirls and curves and arrays of rock formations verging on realistically organic, other logically and geometrically impossible structures that towered over the wastes.

Interlocking blocky columns towered, forming into a mimicry of basins and canyons. Fields of spires rose out of indistinct, white-blurred oceans of what would have looked like fogbanks to the human eye, bare and left standing lonely in the endless streams of light. The fog strobed darkly with color here and there, calling to mind the undersides of a stormcloud—then went back to soot, white, dimness.

Some of the data drifted in aimless clumps through the air as would clouds of rubbish and smog. Stray panels littered the distorted world’s horizon, forcing the smog to part and flow over them.

(Further below that even the layers of the Undernet. Below the hole in the network’s underbelly (which some smartass had dubbed the Underground since said hole tunneled down _underneath_ the Undernet.) And below even the solemn, grey graveyards of discarded data and the remnants of deleted NetNavis, down further there, down, down, down: there was where solidity of a network proper with a floor, with its established directions of ‘up’ and ‘down,’ was lost, and all light was merely fed speck by speck to the deep blackness.

A yawning abyss under the Underground that was part of the Undernet but not, where there was no variance in the darkness: just a void full of trash data. Perhaps something lived down there. Perhaps something did not.

But let’s not go that far down yet.

The Undernet network proper, solid and messy and chaotic. Panelled pathways and wasteland and grime and junk and data nobody had any use for. That’s where all the fun is. That’s where the life is. Let’s start there.)

 

 

The internet city had been constructed out of the mesa that loomed up imposingly out of the wastes, the burning, hazy lights of windows crawling up the cliffs, the face of which was pockmarked with roads and holes and the arches of metal doors; perhaps calling it a city was too generous. In parts, it was more slum than city. Once, as a smaller cluster of rest-stops around an Undersquare situated on a high traffic-node for the occasional electronic being that dropped by, it might have looked nice.

In the years to come, some parts of the inhabited Undernet would develop into thriving if seedy metropolises, filled with activity and life; it was clear this place would not be among them.

It was dusty and ramshackle, unmemorable

Buildings snugged up against one another, packed tight into neat, geometric lines in the center before going askew into haphazard rows further out. In the narrow streets that burrowed downwards into the crust of the ground, the movement of illegal business was threaded throughout the city. Malware traded hands in back alleys; tamed viruses were the least dangerous of the wares on sale if one knew where to stick their nose.

A shadow detached itself from the horizon of the badlands that edged the desolation that made up the majority of the environment, picking its way down the rocks to the outskirts of the city, sending pebbles and iridescent bits of rubbish tumbling downward. It was unaccompanied. It was quiet.

It crept closer.

The shadow glowered up at the buildings looming up before it. The pitch black windows of the closest one leered back, indifferent.

 

The lines of its shoulders tensed, bunched in readiness, and then with a grunt, it launched itself high into the air, hitting the side of the building, feet slamming into the wall; another bound, and the shadow was over the lip onto the rooftop and disappearing into the recesses of the city. The only evidence of its approach left was a long scuffed line of footmarks between the rocks, soon wiped clean by the hand of the wind.

It darted from building to building; one last leap and it was sailing over a wide gap between roofs. The roof shuddered slightly under the solid force of the impact of its feet before the framework snapped itself to a halt and stilled again. A few bits of the structure succumbed to pre-existing cracks and broke off. The shadow paced down the edge of the building underfoot, instinctively gauging the final drop to the lower levels now that there was a clear gap to be measured, then jumped, dirty cloak flaring out behind him.

Forte dropped down to one of the panels of the metal pathways lightly with a soft _thud_ , cloak billowing, then settling noiselessly around his ankles.

He straightened up. Glanced around.

The black maw of the streets yawned below, an open depth running between the balconies that clung as fungi would to the sides of buildings.

Once or twice, vehicles veered past, the blur of their lonely lights tracing lines in the air above the abyss. In its depths, more lights hung. The support pillars underneath the tangle of pathways stood weathered, rusted together, the metallic shine of the metal gone dull and dented with lack of maintenance, stained with corrosion at the joints. At some point a NetNavi, possibly operating under a delusion of artistry, had once tried to cover the rust up with a bright coating, graffiti patterns of painted-on blocks and hexagons, to make a select few of them look polished and colorful. Like the city, it too might have looked nice one time ago, with its muted tones and curling, cubic lines.

The coating was stripped away entire now, leaving again exposed to the air crumbling blocks of base code and worn circuits.

A wordless twitch crept across the corners of Forte’s mouth.

He went past the pillars of the higher walkways, the pulse of traffic lights, the city lights falling in bars across the metal pathway. Forte stepped into one crosshatch of thinned, yellowed light, fully visible for a scant moment, then back into the shadow laying thick between them in the next breath where he was only an outline against the gloom. The city has a coldness to a NetNavi’s senses, its shadows warmer than the open areas. A human would have failed to notice it. Forte doesn’t think much of anything of it.

Below the higher, elevated branches of pathways that jumped the streets, the traffic was thicker.

There were no crowds as densely packed as the term would call to mind for human cities, of course. Only a few raggedly clusters of Undernavis moved down the web of twisting pathways, most of said pathways deserted at this hour—some had hoods pulled up over their faces, granting themselves the safety of anonymity. They kept close to each other. They were moving in eddies as small crowds do, bound towards unnamed destinations. Bulky machines that stood taller than the Undernavis, loaded with goods to transport, trundled past, little green programs floating twittering around them. But there was a hint of hot excitement in the air, a thrum of that collective, happy bloodthirst that came with a communally-sanctioned spectator sport, regarding the upcoming bouts in the arena perched above. Makeshift virus-fighting pits on the weekends to kill time didn’t truly compare. The faint buzz of _who do you think will win this time? My zenny’s on_ —

— _hope they put on a good show for the masses, whoever’s the losers. Deletion’s quite a cold comfort otherwise._ A laugh. Boots stomping across the ground. Clunk, clunk, clunk. _Hey, if the Under-ranker’s actually coming to watch, do ya’ think we’ll get a chance to see ‘em challenged?_

— _700 zenny anyway, on the bastards getting their fraggin’ faces fragged before the hour’s out, never mind living to see the tournament, don’t they_ know _you don’t piss off the gang like that_ —Fingers snap. The hiss of grainy sound escaping a mouth. It might be a laugh.

—whoa, _HEY,_ _come back here, you, you snot-nosed, DATA-DECAYED’ scumbag, that belongs to me, NOT you, don’t_ —

—running into a babbling din, Forte brushed aside like he would cobwebs. It was not important to his business here. It was not needed.

Forte’s feet against the panels was a quiet patter as he descended.

Overhead the sounds of machinery clattered, energy circuits humming away in the walls. (In a few years, the machinery sounds would fade away and there would only be the droning of electricity left. The unfading brightness of cyberspace.) Further down, a couple of Undernavis loitered at a junction, hanging over the railings and hooting to each other. One hit its boot into a cyber-ball aglow with lines, and guffawed when it nailed another in the face. Two others on the side, a deactivated torso and an arm that was missing most of its fingers lying between them, being shelled of its programs, its core functions too crushed to salvage, look up from their work and clap.

Sore-faced, the NetNavi shook its fist and chased after the first one, shouting. The first one backed up and fled in a half-hearted attempt at gaining distance. Feet thump against the ground. There’s a tussle over the cyber-ball, won by the second NetNavi dribbling it away laughing, three other weaklings tailing it in hot pursuit.

Forte flicked his eyes over them without turning his head and assessment was done, dispassionately. They are secure in their numbers, deluded into _thinking_ there was safety in it instead of more weaknesses. They are unguarded and puny; they are not paying attention; they are not threats; they are not worth anything.

Forte strode past them as if they were smoke, looking straight ahead of him, eyes unblinking. The NetNavis don’t look at the threat passing them by on a whim. They were too busy squabbling for possession of the ball, two pinning the second Netnavi on both sides while a third went in for its feet.

There wasn’t anything about Forte’s ragged appearance to take note of in a city thronging with far more peculiarly-customized NetNavis who considered as common practice betting and swapping away programs—and the less civilized cousin to that practice, disregarding the pretenses at mutual agreement and ripping them clean out of each other. To the victor goes the spoils, after all. That was only fair. That was to be expected. (It tended to result in some mishmashed design combinations.)

The anger smouldering in his eyes wasn’t so significant as to make him stand out.

Forte had learned the basic courtesy of coiling in his energy signature tight into his frame and not letting a single bit of it leak out did _wonders_ for his ability to travel incognito.

Their voices receded swiftly into the distance, covered up by more noise, different Navis talking.

 

 

Forte left the main streets behind him. The pathways broke apart and branched as he slipped through the openings between buildings hanging suspended in the air. He slowed to a stop beside the metallic base of a bent sign-post pole. The signs hung transparent, letters scrolling slowly across the holographic surfaces. He swept his scanner over the area; a handful of weak viruses scampering about, nothing to spare attention for. Assorted signatures—NetNavi signatures—three buildings down, several more behind the doors five buildings down, a bunch more in the building with the tacky billboard on the other side of the street. A repeated, quick scan rewarded him with nothing different. Checking his second built-in radar revealed little else. Forte eyed the broken-teeth rows of buildings stretching down the cramped alleyway.

There.

That empty warehouse.

That would do.

The rusted cyberlock clamped over the handles of the back entrance troubled him no more than had a wad of plastic been in its place, and gave way when Forte casually slammed a fist into it, and let its heavy pieces drop to the ground. It broke into a flurry of data particles upon impact, vanishing.

Forte ducked out of sight inside, tracking digital sand over the threshold.

Whomever its users had once been, legally or illegally, the building was long abandoned, the hollow metal inside of it littered with all of the small traces and signs of the neglected and the dilapidated corners in the network. The digital goods it had housed were gone. The foot traffic was delightfully non-existent, promising a sharp decrease in the chances of somebody being sufficiently reckless to try their hand at putting the occasional ‘welcome-to-my-territory now- _get-out_ ’ blade in Forte’s blind spot when he was trying to unwind. Under the dust, the square-tile grid of the floor was lit with a soft glow, the yellow of dying electricity. Thin slants of city light come dripping in through the holes in what was left of the ribs of the vaulted roof. Viruses had been picking away at it for awhile now.

Humans had built this place, designed it from the ground up, and then abandoned it to rot with a laugh.

There was probably a joke somewhere in there, something about humans playing god and diligence going to waste and carelessness, but he cannot place it.

A search turned up junk, half-rusted empty metal containers tipped on their sides, and an old, bugged-up piece of compressed mystery data that flickered and buzzed like an especially maniacal fly in a corner, but without a delocker program on hand, Forte had to pick it up and manually hack through it; it was just an old subchip. He turned it over in his fingers, running a scan. No malware.

He didn’t need the data. He took it anyway.

Not inclined to be picky outside of paranoia demanding he ensure there were easily accessible exit routes aside from the back and front doors (there was, exactly, six possible exits, seven if he counted all of the window panes in one sweep)—and his scanner be left on in the background of his systems to perform the infrequent low-priority proximity sweeps—Forte pushed rubble out of the way, cleaning a spot behind a wall of the metal containers. Shifting his cloak so it fell behind his back, he sat down. Checked his internal clock. The fighting tournament was not for several more hours. Forte hmphed, cross. He supposed he could use that time to catch up on his often-neglected sleep mode, since training like he was used to within the cramped confines of the internet city wasn’t an appealing thought.

(Too many structures in the way, for one thing.)

Forte didn’t want to go into sleep mode.

 

 

He couldn’t relax.

Forte got up, stalked around the structure’s perimeter. Completed the circle twice before sitting back down in the spot he’d vacated. Tension didn’t drain out of him. This was nothing new. He checked his internal clock again. The hours between now and then had not been inexplicably sawed in half.

So. Time. He had time to kill.

Lots of it. A few hours.

Forte turned his attention away from his internal clock program. Data required sorting. He pulled up a floating data screen and pressed a hand flat to the surface. It lit up at his touch. Here were the bug reports. Here were the extra files that were best deleted to clear space. Other files could be shuffled around. Here was the feedback from his subroutines. Here were the records of he’d kept of where he had previously sustained physical damage and when and how it had been repaired, tagged with notes on how to prevent it from happening again. Here were the readouts on past fluctuations in his energy output and when the spikes from the baseline had occurred. Here are a dozen small details Forte must attend to if Forte was concerned with keeping himself functioning at full capacity like he should.

Forte set to work.

Survival is mundane in the end. Unremarkable things, simple things, repeated, ceaselessly.

It wasn’t a complicated undertaking to compact life down to a series of repetitions.

Fight to survive, struggle, and keep moving, and walk, and fight, and steal, and fight, and keep moving, moving, and walk and walk and walk. It wasn’t much of a task to scratch out of yourself anything wasn’t a prelude to finding what you needed to survive and taking it. It wasn’t hard to not give a damn about anything else.

Forte was used to resting in suitably small corners like this whenever he found them, recharging, performing the basics of the maintenance he required in solitude, leaving them with little sign of disturbance when he moved on.

Staying too long in a single place would leave him itching.

He already missed the empty places of the Underdesert—missed its quiet. The city was not quiet. There was a _reason_ he tended to go out of his way to avoid the populated regions of the Undernet.

 

...

 

Okay, fine. _Fine_. Maybe the way sand got into everything out there in the wasteland was annoying.

Forte didn’t _enjoy_ occasionally having to temporarily detach his armor pieces from his frame so he could better shake out the sand from the crannies formed by their sharp edges, didn’t enjoy having to wretch off his helmet (it would snap free of his audio receptors with a _click_ ) and wipe off the finely-rendered but accumulated dirt from the fins and the grooves where the fins seamlessly joined the helm.

The golden metal—the black metal, too—wasn’t pristine anymore; his hands would often find slight nicks, small scratches scored in its surface when Forte turned it over in them, carefully, inspecting it for damage to be repaired, for where he ought to apply the (stolen, copied) recovery data.

And sometimes how the desert’s wind cut right through him (even after he’d tugged the collar up higher and wrapped his cloak tighter around his shoulders, burying his nose in it as he plowed forward through the gusts) was most unpleasant.

Why had the humans been so preoccupied with those sort of details when they’d programmed it years ago? What was the point?

And even there, even out in the Underdesert where the weak and the foolish were swift to perish and only the mighty remained to triumph, as was right, as it should be, it seemed to Forte events conspired to personally spite his quest to find something, anything at all equal of him—worthy of presenting a true challenge to him and engaging in combat, worthy of him subsequently snapping their neck and drinking down every drop of their power once they were dead. That was something anybody could desire, he was sure, something that might test their abilities to the limit and get their core racing.

Something new. Something worth dredging up excitement for.

The Underdesert was leagues of wasteland and yet, not a hardy challenger to be found anywhere in any square _inch_ of it.

All that aside, the Undernet was a quiet and lonely place. Forte preferred it there, the pitiless solitude of it. It didn’t hate him but it didn’t care for him as well. It had no need of him. Once accustomed to being either loathed or dotted upon, Forte found indifference comforting.

He could work with indifference.

 

* * *

 

The data screen blinked out.

The planes of his face no longer illuminated by its synthetic glow, Forte leaned back, air cooling in the back of his throat.

It had been two hours.

A little longer….

Biding his time like this entailed suffering himself to sit through periods of hanging around and doing nothing, and Forte found it dull. It wasn’t bad nor unpleasant, it was simply… dull. Boring. He had nothing else to do. He didn’t want to wait. He certainly wasn’t going to waste it fooling around like those weaklings he’d seen back at one of the junctions, young and laughing, careless and stupid. He briefly tried to imagine the feeling of what living in a mind like theirs must be like, fumbling along without the clarity rage lent him—lacking the clear cold sense of _purpose_ that was what drove Forte on.

It’s almost beyond him to picture it.

To stoop so low as to depend on others…

 _Heh_.

Idiocity, plain and simple. Forte didn’t need such soft things to survive; maybe they were too pathetic to stand on their own feet, but _he_ could get by just fine by himself. He depended on no one. He was strong. He wouldn’t let himself falter. He had the power to do so. He would use it. Forte knew what became of those who had no power. People spared no mercy for others; people treated people the way they allowed themselves to be treated. The moment you let slip weakness that could be seized upon, you were done for. To feel pity for others, to be malleable to others, to be weak, was to give them excuses to heap misery on you. Forte had no interest in misery.

The moment you had the sufficient power, people would know better than to dare cross you and would leave you be to get things done (unless they were _complete_ idiots.)

That was all that mattered. The more of power you had, the better. If one wanted to be feared, if one wanted to be respected, one needed to _give_ people a reason to fear you.

Power was as good a reason as any.

Of course, power was not something other people handed over. Power was not something other people _gave_ you. (Not without a price tag attached. That was power on a leash and therefore pointless.)

Power was something one _took_. Permanently. You won it, you killed for it, you earned it.

In the right hands, power could make what you wanted reality.

Forte understood power’s sum total: a tool.

A means to an end. Not the end itself. It was there to be mastered by whose with a strong will, and how useful it proved in practice towards achieving one’s ends rested solely on how its usage was done; power with no will, no direction behind it was not mere weakness; it was tantamount to _wastefulness_. Tools were crafted to put in somebody's hands. Power _existed_ to be used. There was no more meaning to it. You used it or it used you. There must be momentum driving you and your usage of it forward.

There was no reason why Forte wouldn’t be able to put to far superior pursuits the powers he seized from whatever unfortunate NetNavis who crossed his path.

Fabric rustled, folded.

Forte stretched and crossed his legs, metal leg-guard slung over metal leg-guard, and craned his head back. Without him working away at the screen, his corner of the warehouse had gone dark. Not dark as the darkness the human world could be plunged into. The cyberworld ran on different mechanics. There was no such thing as true nighttime in the cyberworld, not even in the Undernet. It was always bright day in and day out, smooth edges tinted a gleaming overlay of blue or yellow or green or red, the air suffused with the background hum of electricity.

One had to go far, far down to find a place where it was not.

(And Forte was yet to try and go that far down.)

This corner, it was lit by the virtue of the indistinct streams of light that dotted the tiles with pale pools through the holes in the roof; through the holes, beyond the city lights, the sky was its usual tone—the milky-bright flickering expanse of noise, an endless flurry of grey-black-white static-snow like a broken television set. He trained his eyes on it.

Once, Forte had childishly harbored the notion that he could assume obtaining the power to wipe humanity off the face of the planet would be a simple task, a work of a three, four years at the longest.

Get himself back into fighting shape, locate said power, seize it for himself and then condemn the humans to the destruction that was everything they deserved. A quick end yes, but it was a kinder fate than what miseries Forte thought they ought to be rightly dealt.

Then reality had proceeded to set in.

(There are a _lot_ of humans, a lot more than what he had thought there were back in the labs, and they multiplied… really, really fast.)

Steadily accumulating power was all well and good, if Forte had been willing to settle for stopping at becoming the strongest NetNavi in the network. Yet for the purposes of getting rid of the human filth, it was not an effective method. No, this scheme demanded some… some decisive stroke, a power so great the humans’ options for retaliation would be made simple for them.

(Said options, distilled down to the basics:

Cowering and dying. _Or_ futilely fighting back, and then dying as well.)

But where such a power could be found eluded him still.

What a pain in the rear.

It would be a labor of a decade, at the earliest, and that meant Forte had to bide his time and wait for his opportunity to get what he needed done without too much interference. He still didn’t have a solid _plan_. Forte had plenty of vaguely-defined, cruel ideas that congealed into a messy assortment of plots aimed towards revenge. No strategy for it. Which was a problem. Very much so a problem. But, tch, that wasn’t too important. It wasn’t like how he was collecting power at the moment necessitated plans.

He’d cross that bridge when he came to it. The plan would come. He had nothing but time for that. The black NetNavi wasn’t in a hurry.

The network wasn’t going anywhere.

And neither were the humans and neither was Forte.

 

It came down to this, a baseline for accomplishment—he would have his revenge on humanity. Forte would not be stopped, not ever, and he would continue until there was nothing left of the humans, and the NetNavis fool enough to side with them, nothing but ash and bits of junk data. It warmed Forte in his core, a charge of voltage soaking into him and pooling thickly inside, just thinking about it.

 

He smiled at nothing in particular and longed for things preferably left undescribed.

 

**.**

* * *

 

**.**

**20.**

The fighting tournament was a disappointment.

The untrammeled violence, the battles he desired, the slaughter, the challenge, would not be found here. Forte had been courteous, there, in his opinion, in the arena. He had entered himself properly into the tournament as a competitor. He had waited his turn. He had been nothing but fair to the opponents he had faced. _Come on. Come and get me if you dare. I’m right here. Come and try your luck_.

But his opponents were all weak and unsurprisingly disappointing. They didn’t win. Of course they didn’t, they never did, they never _could_ , not against him. Forte had thrown himself against them, against everybody who came up against him, but they broke easily and lost with even less effort.

It was —it was —it was, _laughable_ was the word for it. None of them are strong enough.

He had crushed them.

So easy.

 

 

It was pathetic.

 

 

In the distance the smoking wreckage of the arena sagged and sank into the mesa’s sandy top, debris falling out of sight off the edge of the mesa to doubtlessly smash into unsuspecting buildings below. Its outer walls had buckled around the multiple crater-wide, gaping holes blown through them. The inner stadium seats uttered the metallic shriek of bending, tearing metal, being crushed under the jags of rubble. Flames leapt up. Plumes of smoke poured forth and crawled up towards the far-away circuits of energy that crackled here and there above in the static-ridden sky.

Fingers curled loosely around a handrailing that was cool to the touch, Forte watched from the ledge that he was balancing atop. His cloak swayed around his ankles.

Through the smudges of heat mirages, NetNavis shouted to each other. They were like ants crawling about a disturbed nest. He wondered if the visiting Under-ranker was among them. Forte could pick out the thin, widening lines of the data blocks that made up the arena’s structure slowly cracking apart from each other, exposing slips of the base code, outer and inner walls succumbing to the damage. The arena tumbled down on itself.

The collapse raised another wall of dust and louder shouts. Shouts booming up, screaming, chaos.

The breeze carried the noise well.

Forte scoffed, contemptuous, turning his back without a second thought. He followed the ledge to the other corner of the building’s side. The ragged edges of his cloak whisked around the corner and went of sight with the rest of him.

It wasn’t enough, none of it was ever enough.

The want of _more_ thrums through his circuits, a low hum, creaseless. Destruction was like drinking down salt water to sate a dry throat; it only made him thirstier, doing nothing to truly satisfy him.

He would have to look elsewhere for an opportunity to quiet the need.

**.**

* * *

 

**.**

**21.**

He made good time; Forte was down the other, jagged cliffside of the mesa that was threaded through with data streams and leaving the city crouched on the opposite side of it behind him before long. The breeze too, had stayed behind with the miserable little internet city and its crooked corridors. The wind would come back in time the further out he went, billowing and rushing at his face.

The traces of other NetNavis’ presence soon melted away.

It was Forte’s footprints that marked the rolls and dips in the Underdesert floor, no other. Silence settled in. Slabs of craggy data jutted out of the ground in places to break the monotony and grope upward as the fingers of a giant’s hand would, as if the crags were seeking to snatch the floating boulders from where they hung above. Their shadows stamped shapes across the landscape.

The wind met him with a bite.

 

Hours later, Forte hopped up onto a spire taller than a building that jutted sideways on an angle and strode up to the end where rock gave way to air. One of the shadows caught him as he went under it, dipping across his face and slashing down across his shoulders.

His red eyes scanned ahead.

As always, the thin edge of the sky meeting the horizon was the same barren, rocky frontier stretching out before him. A thought flickered up: _his to grasp_.

Forte jumped down and walked on.

Where should he should search next?—he asked himself this abruptly.

Forte had scoured this continent's network top to bottom. Scraped through the dregs. Deleted scores of challengers, scores of combat NetNavis, run-away navis, civilian navis, security navis, plus a handful of NetNavis who has the simple misfortune of irritating him. Bores, every single one. Boring tactics, boring powers, boring struggles when they tried to overcome him. That city had been the last stop he’d planned on making in this region. Why linger longer than necessary? There was no reason to stay. There was nothing to stay _for_. He went where it pleased him to go. There seemed to be a few promising rumors over in Australia’s Undernet of new strong Undernavis prone to talking themselves and their combat programming up that might be worth investigating.

 

It’d be fun to smash their heads in at least if they weren’t able to live up to his expectations—

 

All the better if the fools turned out to have power worth claiming.

Forte nodded to himself, lips twisting into a smirk. Head-smashing always had a good taste to it; like he was stepping on an empty soda can. It was a pleasing thought to be shelved in his logs for later execution.


	2. put your mind on the problem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Forte goes to the beach. And kills people. But mainly, the point is that he goes to the beach.
> 
> Notes: Please note the writer obviously doesn't condone theft, murder, or the menacing of innocent seagulls, and would advise against taking these actions in reality... Well, unless the seagulls are being nuisances.
> 
> I would like to express my continued thanks to my skilled beta who improves the quality of my chapters greatly. And since I don't want to confuse my readers, it wouldn't hurt to belatedly note that I structure these fanfics so they're more connected vignettes than actually the chapters taking place one immediately after another. There can be substantial time skips between chapters.

******22.**

When the trickles of rumors started drifting through the circuits of the network’s lower reaches of a new NetNavi that had come stalking onto the playing field, powerful and vicious and so-far undefeated and thoroughly indiscriminate in his targets, it was no mystery that more than a handful of others grew curious.

You could put it down to self-preservation—slow, unobservant navis wouldn’t last all that long in the Undernet, just like weaklings didn’t. It was stupid to ignore potential competition.

Or greed.

Putting down newcomers who fancied themselves mighty or convincing them to bend knee and join your gangs didn’t hurt _your_ status one bit.

The black NetNavi was not the first fighter in the Undernet to come out of seemingly thin air, with no hints to his origins—far from it. It was one of the norms of the place, that there was no point in asking after somebody’s past unless it could be capitalized on to one’s benefit and another’s disadvantage in the present. He was not even the most brutal. But he was one of the few ones to have kept his winning streak going uninterrupted for so long after the initial attacks—and the sporadic rampages. A sizable chunk of them dubbed it a fluke in the beginning, for this newcomer to be gaining notoriety so rapidly. Some decided they ought to teach him a lesson about wannabes' proper place in the pecking order.

He didn’t care about any of it, beyond the gratification of discovering that he didn’t even need to trouble himself to search for them.

Forte was fully realizing reputation could be not just be manipulated and maintained, but also _exploited_ to one’s advantage. He had understood it before, as a matter of secondhand information, something created by others, superficial at the best, generated and transmitted and distorted through dozens of sources. It could be twisted, ballooning beyond recognition within days, pristine one instance, gone the next.

People were quick to look for cracks. Chinks in the surface. Quicker still to hook their fingers into them and tear them apart. Fickle. Hardly a reliable thing. You couldn’t _rely_ on reputation.

But you could _use_ it once it was there.

Reputation drove some away, he had grown to understand after he’d ripped a noticeable dent in the ranks of a couple pitiful gangs in one of the Undernet’s busier sectors, while it sent more running straight towards him in droves, daydreaming of a petty moment of glory, shouting their demands for deletion. They always thought they were _challenging_ him, the insects. Always made that mistake.

They were wrong.

They were asking Forte, very loudly, to delete them. He had no problems obliging them and sometimes looting their remains if the mood struck him.

He cared nothing about their reasons nor their boring tactics, but there was a rush of intrinsic satisfaction to looked forward to in fighting itself, no matter how one-sided. In slamming his fists into their frames again and again and again and again, feeling the crack _crunches_ of it splintering like kindling, in the fear vivid in his enemies’ eyes, in bashing in their navi marks and seeing the pixels spraying out of their back and into the air.

In affirming the code-deep certainty of his superiority with each battle.

(In seeing others fall.)

That was its own reward.

(The losers in this scenario? They should have known better than to challenge the likes of him without preparation.)

Yes, a fearsome reputation had its uses. Uses he could and would cultivate for the future.

And Forte figured so long as it didn’t interfere with the goals he’d set his sights on, there was no harm in it. In fact, investing time in searching out opponents for sizing up and then elimination, didn’t that advance his goal? It made for countless excellent chances at moving target practice with his busters.

Plus, Forte had picked up three more _decent_ new abilities in as many of the last weeks alone, and he was looking forward to modifying the programming code of the fire-type one to pack more of a punch over long range and taking it out for a test run later.

The insects might dream of becoming the strongest NetNavi in the cyberworld: they didn’t realize he had already left them in his dust.

Not that they were incapable of being irritants anyway.

Today, Forte allowed the thought to surface, he had been careless.

He had been back and forth across the continental network dozens of times and wandered through plenty of nations’ networks, unhampered by the limitations of physical travel.

Things hadn’t gone according to plan right from the moment he’d exited the link gateway between one nation’s Undernet and the other’s network, and walked straight into an ambush by a group of UnderNavi thugs. After laying out most of the NetNavis on the floor panels to break apart and promptly sending the stragglers running for their sorry lives minus assorted limbs, Forte was now slinking through cyberspace and past the low-hanging technicolor cubes and triangles, flat, glossy squares and cylinders, suspended in place midair, arm still converted to one of his busters.

Grimacing, Forte raked his eyes over the other arm.

The staticky forearm of one of the thugs was still attached to the cyberblade wedged straight through his cloak, pinning the cloth in place, and through the bulk of his shoulder, at an angle that made it impossible for him to twist around and yank it out. It looked stupid.

After getting rid of the enemies, he had waded through the haze and ran a scan for which frames hadn’t yet vanished into data particles.

Two meters to his right, three heaps of scorched, crumbling armor had collapsed.

Good.

He hadn’t realized at the time that of course, _of_ _course_ , one of the peons had an ability that let it fake full hitpoint loss and register as deleted to other NetNavis’ sensors: the shade cast by Forte’s hand descending had dropped across its side, Forte mistakenly thinking it so much data pulp, and it had been up in a flash, cyberblade drawn and slamming home in his side. Swallowing down a grunt, Forte’s reflexes had him immediately kicking its knees out from it, probably breaking one of its kneecaps, snarling when the blade lodged in his shoulder up to the hilt had dragged him down with it. Forte had cracked it across the face.

The peon had grimaced and shouted something about—about—what, Forte hadn’t heard over the deafening rush of anger in his head.

The struggle had been quick.

Dispatching it—two shots, one at its arm, the next in its navi emblem—took nanoseconds. Standing back upright, Forte had watched it break apart and disappear.

(The tactic was a sound one. If one was too much of a lowly worm to face him fair and square.

But a sound theory doesn’t necessarily mean it works in practice.)

“Seems it wasn’t their lucky day…” he muttered, dismissing the buster. Having put a short distance between himself and the open ambush site, Forte braced his boot against the side of a cube structure, twisting around and grabbing awkwardly onto the cyberblade’s hilt, tried to pull at it. A prickling ache itched through him. Forte scowled.

“... Hmph.”

Concentrated.

He surged his power through it instead, forcing it inside; unable to tolerate the overload, the cyberblade shattered, the forearm dissolving away into pixels. His frame relaxed slightly. Forte swiped his knuckles against his cheek and reprimanded himself for slipping even momentarily into complacency in a habit.

Complacency did nobody favors.

Pulling out a recovery program he had copied, Forte shrugged the cloak’s folds aside for access, lifted his palm and pressed the program into the gash to speed the repairs along.

His own auto-recovery systems wouldn’t have had a hassle if they handled it by themselves, but Forte hated waiting and operating below his optimal threshold unless he had to. Purple light shone and quickly it slid shut, tiny hexagons of black material reforming and joining together, in spite of the sloppy application.

Poking his fingers through the tear in the cloak’s dirty fabric and seeing them protrude out the other side, Forte inspected the ragged edges.

Forte curled them shut, fisting the fabric up. Crinkled it around his hand.

A reminder; letting your guard drop created an opening. A single misstep can be costly, a challenger’s lucky break. Don’t be lax, don’t be soft and unready. Laxness got NetNavis killed. Take this as the reminder that it should serve as and move on from it. Everybody that wasn’t himself was a potential foe and ought to be distrusted and treated accordingly.

Forte let go of the fabric, a neutral look settling back down on his face, his mouth hidden behind the collar of the cloak.

The black Netnavi strode down the network pathway which sacrificed boxy, straight lines and square platforms in its architecture for triangular platforms, rounded at the corners, and walkway arrangements that curved like snakes. It sloped upward, leading towards a hidden gateway to a different cyberarea. At the foot of it, Forte slowed and stopped, head tipping back slightly, not an ounce of his thoughts showing on his face. The edges glowed faintly, humming a wordless reminder to the senses of each electronic being that used the area of where the flat surface cut off into empty cyberspace; a drop into the frizzling background scrolling past below.

His heels left the ground, then his toes, the shadow under him dwindling, and Forte was hovering.

Forte shook himself, cloak settling more comfortably over his shoulders, before shooting upward.

Interlocking the layers of pathways together in various places, segmented pillars of energy dwarfed him as skyscrapers would when Forte flew past them.

The pathway he was following continued to cant higher and higher.

(How long had it been since he had felt there was a reason to go up to the surface of the network for a stay longer than an hour or so?)

One of the central hubs in this nation’s Undernet have an Undersquare that housed a Ranking Statue’s looming, dark bulk and if he had timed his visit right, Forte could finish his brief detour up and get back there in time for the latest cycle of the official Ranking sessions.

There was a presence in the network that lurked out of sight in its deepest areas and was content to be called something other than its real name, was content to hold power yet not constantly tighten their grip in order to remind others of it. There was misdirection: there’s nobody to see there, there’s nobody to fight, you must be imagining things. Mutters that can’t quite be squashed: an edit notice on a removed board post, a silent update on base structural restrictions, rumors of a Rank on the top that had not once exchanged hands.

(A potent reminder: _nine other NetNavis might claim to be the mightiest ones in the Undernet, but there was one that reigned above them all_.)

It’s hard to take down something that defied attempts to pin it in place.

Not that Forte was cowed by that. He’d fought Under-rankers before—they were nothing special. This one might be of a higher tier. That didn’t mean they weren’t conquerable. A challenge was a challenge was a challenge.

And if they—this Navi called S—were so gracious as to hand him on a platter a starting point to hunting them down… He wasn’t going to limit himself to beating the coding out of the cyberworld’s thugs forever.

Forte had no inclination to play by the Ranking’s rulebook anyway.

 

**.**

* * *

 

**23.**

**.**

The seasons rolled on like driftwood caught in the currents of a stream. Winter melting into spring. Spring bleeding into summer. Summer wilting into fall and it spun over again. In the human world, it was the height of autumn, brisk and harsh with the moisture it had sucked out of the air. Leaves crackled and crunched richly underfoot. The air popped, stinging with cold.

Those years ago.

That day.

To learn more about that day, in those first unpleasant years...

The fragmented details behind the Alpha Revolt were, for Forte, an inference drawn from facts that gleamed afterwards, stolen from a parade of Scilab databanks he’d spent months electronically breaking into. Government servers he’d pillaged in search of the reason **_why_** _, there must have been a trigger there_ must _have been_ something _it couldn’t be otherwise_. NetOfficial networks hacked and torn open in the dead of the night.

Forte had been on one side of a divide in information.

Nobody had exactly stopped to explain to him what was happening at the time it was occurring.

And then, well. By the time the repairs on his data had come far enough long that he could slip back out of the deserted regions of deep cyberspace where he had holed up to recover and venture up to the surface network, the humans had released a public story that consisted primarily of bullshit to the population, and quietly swept the affair under the rug.

Out of sight, out of mind, that’s how it went, right?

Hah.

As if.

The Alpha system hadn’t been hacked.

Forte hadn’t done a thing to sabotage it; as far as he grasped it, nobody had. Alpha itself had been the source of the systems’ destruction. Alpha itself had caused the accidents. Alpha, simply put, had gone so stunningly buggy it had began mindlessly glutting itself on everything it touched so it might spawn more of itself. Everything that hadn’t been fast enough to get _away_.

Forte remembered the screaming. Quite clearly, too.

And then it had stopped.

He had ran cross-checks of his memory logs afterwards to determine whether or not the red gunk he also remembered had been a hallucination concocted from the damage of his injuries (it hadn’t been, that much was clear in hindsight. The slash that had been cut across his chest, hip to shoulder in its length, the numerous dents, tears and bruises he had accumulated afterwards—no. They had hurt, sure, whatever who cared about that, but they had not glitched him into making up falsified sensory input wholesale.)

The red gunk had been real.

But what _it_ had been… Forte was yet to reach a conclusion. A security feature gone wrong? No, that wasn’t it. He had _known_ all of the security measures the human scum commonly employed during his time at the labs, back to front and up and down. Had prided himself on that knowledge. Security measures gone viral didn’t feel like... _that_. Those lumps had felt _wrong_ , oozing with that wrongness, more malign to the senses than a virus. A side-effect of the revolt?

He didn’t know what had been up with that.

Forte couldn’t stand not knowing. To remedy that, he had set himself to the task of working out what had happened.

The fallout from the Alpha Revolt was an online mosaic of damage reports, suspiciously-covered insurance bills, and severed connections, of complaints of abruptly wiped hard drives and permanently crashed websites—the lifeline of every computer and radio dish and tower had been killed for miles around Scilabs. The city hall networks of eighteen towns at a minimum had shut down for anywhere from nine weeks to two months, a few for five or six months.

Forte was conscious of this solely because he had tracked it down. It was a tangle. Some of it contradicted other information. One report claimed one thing, the documents in another registry stated the opposite.

He had ignored much of the non-classified snippets he had traced during the hunt that concerned the scientists. The black NetNavi already knew they were blatantly guilty as a whole, zero exceptions—therefore it’d be a waste of time for double check on an established fact.

He had focused on ferreting out the other aspects he was less clued in on.

(A fact: they deserved to be destroyed. To be crushed down onto their knees with despair. Know an ending was coming and that they couldn’t stop it. Intern, technician, assistant, scientist, board member, janitor, it didn’t matter. Not a bit. Verdict: collectively guilty of the charge. Guilty guilty guilty. What remained was just selecting the proper method for carrying out the judgement.

They deserved to _die_.)

The humans had worked hard to hide it—and he had to hand it to them, they _had_ known what they were doing with the cover-up.

Much of what... little he could find on the revolt had been solely the leftovers from information being removed, bricked to hell and back. Bits misplaced, winding up in incorrect places. Even in the government servers, mentions of red gunk? Nowhere. None of them. If there were, they had been lost in the cover-up.

It had won a lot of teeth-grinding from Forte.

This was the best, he had told himself, he could expect of humans when it came to accurate record-keeping. It for them, tended to be a mixed bag of half-not-really-truths or lies at the best. It made information-gathering a pain in the rear. But there was still pieces of data stuffed under layered encryptions, data remnants pushed into squalid crannies. There were surveillance cameras and deleted caches. There was satellites and old PETS in dozens of hands and pockets. They slipped through the cracks.

There are stories too, that was no surprise.

But as somebody who had been present, Forte could discern that their credibility varied depending on the forum the latest conspiracy theory was posted on, how many views the poster in question had been gunning for, and the time of week.

Useless.

The scope of the cover-up was impressive. Unsurprising.

It had been more of a surprise to discover during the search that he himself had been thoroughly erased from the same databanks. The first time he’d ran across this occurrence in a Scilab server (he stuck to the government offices and minor, small Scilab branches and covered his tracks: breaking into the central ones was asking for unwanted trouble…—for now) he’d hacked his way into, where logic said his own project warranted a mention and not gotten it, he’d dismissed it as an anomaly.

The third time, the fourth time, it hadn’t been possible to brush off.

Somebody had gotten into the Scilab servers long before he had and permanently wiped almost every mention of him from the databanks.

Him and the Auto-Navi project.

The scarce data that remained was impersonal, devoid of sentiment, useful only for building onto the pure technical advancements that had been made by the scientists from studying him. He gleamed that the crux of the project itself remained, but a quick look, skimming through the few files on it that he could safely access from the latest server he’d broken into (while restraining the rapidly increasing urge to _fry_ said server) had told him it had been renovated and moved into a new researcher’s jurisdiction, even if the tightened security classification levels on it had been too ridiculously high for him to deem it worth the risk of his hacking being unsuccessful, discovered and Scilabs being put on the alert to bother finding out which one. He didn’t give a crap who it was truthfully, only what it meant.

A footnote.

A damned _footnote_.

That was all he summed up to them in the end. That was it.

Forte had smoldered with fury then and it coaxed his ever-present rage higher even now to recall it.

Oh, they really had well and truly seen him as a tool to be used and discarded to benefit them and serve their whims and receive a grand total of nothing in return, not once a person like them, from start to finish.

How humans hated it when they were wrong, proven wrong, over and over again, by something they had created, something that had surpassed them. How Forte despised the mere thought of them. He had been—was better than every last one of them on the face of the planet. If only he had realized that right away.

One day he was going to enjoy it when he methodically slaughtered all those worms held dear in payback.

Fact: Forte wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t observed any drastic overhauls of every area in the network following the initial havoc of the revolt. It was fair game to assume whatever had been done to it to keep it docile, Alpha remained running to some extent as the foundation of the network.

Inference: That old man Hikari was probably behind that.

He had been the one who spearheaded the team for the Alpha project for years. He had been the one responsible for huge swathes of the coding—if Alpha was reined back and its core mechanisms locked up in wherever they’d shoved it to collect dust in order to protect their precious net society’s infrastructure, he was the obvious choice.

Fact: If the humans had any sense, they’d delete it—they couldn’t control it anymore, after all. Alpha wasn’t like a NetNavi. Alpha did not hate or fear or desire or reason. It hungered. If it couldn’t be bent to their wishes, they would not tolerate its existence.

Inference: So, it would take time, certainly, time and effort to replace the foundation of the network so their net society wouldn’t crumple with Alpha’s uprooting and removal, but Forte wagered in a matter of years, they would do just that and a rampant system that had collapsed into itself with glitches like Alpha would be irrelevant.

Why keep a defect around?

It had not been pretended by any of them that Alpha was their family rather than a tool.

… Although, this was all working off that assumption that the human filth _had_ common sense. Forte had piles of evidence that wasn’t the case.

Whatever.

Not his problem anymore.

 

(Feeling: Forte was certain he could handle it much better this time if he dealt with Alpha for a second round. No limiters, no cages, no restraints, not this time. Never again. He wouldn’t permit them to be forced on him twice. He’d gotten stronger and Forte had nothing to fear from a bugged-up thing like that. He could beat it with one hand tied behind his back.

But Forte would be happier if he didn’t lay eyes on Alpha again in his existence. It threw unwelcome flashbacks back in sharp relief; memories of those pathetic fools in white labcoats, red goop, fire, a sharp headache. _Crack_. The floor under his shoulders. The urge to harm bubbling up, overwhelming. Running.

He was a computer program. He didn’t suffer from decays in his memory files’ clarity.

Forte could misremember things, but he never once forgot them.

Dropping down their recall prioritization levels far, far back in his logs was the next best thing.)

 

  
They would pull the plug on Alpha one day and good riddance to bad rubbish. Forte regretted he’d wasted his time on trying to safeguard such a creation.

The years have slid past, inevitably.

He cultivated his hatred; no mother nursed their child as diligently as Forte nursed his resentment towards the humans that had ruined his life, tended it, brooded over it, warmed and reared and fed it. The fuel for it, burnt it up endlessly, as greedy for more as an oil well fire, raw with fury. It wanted that fuel.

He indulged it.

Forte was what he had became, what he had allowed himself to be formed into. It is beyond him to think of wanting to be something else (it is pathetic to think of wanting something else than... this. This was to be mighty, this was to be safe, to be invincible, this was more powerful than those weaklings ever dared dream he could have been, weighed down by nobody, tireless, untethered, free to be alone at all times—virtually unstoppable.

The alternative is that desperate, grasping— _feeling_ he remembered from his youth.

He didn’t care to feel like that again.)

 

**.**

* * *

 

**24.**

**.**

The drone tottered unevenly from side to side before finding its balance, buzzing and hefting itself into the sky.

Its shadow darted across the underbush and raced over green, scratchy shrubs and treetops until the foothills dropped down, green giving way to sand, and marched to meet the beach. The lone machine was a speck buzzing out past the line of pale, light teal underwater outcroppings and over deep, blue-green waters.

A seagull winged closer, circling out of reach of the drone’s propellers.

It coasted on the wind, clacking its beak and cawing at it. The drone abruptly jerked on its course, nearly clipping the seagull on the closest wing with a propeller. With an insulted squawk and a few dislodged feathers floating free, the seagull deposited a wet splatter on the drone’s side and peeled off, flapping away.

Behind the drone’s lens, Forte rolled his eyes.

He tapped one finger on the data viewscreen he had hooked the feed onto. It expanded a measly couple of inches. (Damn, why had the human users set it so small? Did the humans think it was going to be used by a shrimpy virus?) Still not as big as Forte wanted it to be. He pinched at the viewscreen on both sides and jerked, dragging it in two directions, flinging it wider.

 _There_. It snapped into the new settings.

A better view.

Rotating, the drone spun so the viewscreen displayed blurred snatches from the lush coastline hunched behind it—the white-capped surf lapping at the beach where the hollowed out shells of crabs lay on the sand, the scattered flowers swaying in the breeze—before it faced the ocean again. It panned slowly, at Forte’s remote commands. From below, the reflections bouncing off the waves dappled its underbelly with ripples of light.

Forte leaned in closer, a hand coming up to press against the holographic surface.

The ocean was vast, its distant, blue horizon spanning from one side of the screen to the other.

Something about it spoke of the same uncompromising visibility of the Undernet, even if the ocean was probably smaller than the whole of the network; the feeling that if you let other things recede, shrink away and let it surround you on all sides, it would be easy to see in the face of it how there was nowhere to hide, nothing to slip inside. Not truly. There was only you at the finish line, only you before its scope.

It could swallow you whole and not notice.

Strange to think life teemed in a thing that seemed so empty.

Dawn had cracked across that same horizon, spilling its pale, washed out light over its rim and suffusing the mounds of clouds stacked up on it with a delicate, translucent pink. A brilliant shade of orange and red, bleeding to maroon at the edges, were close to follow on its heels.

(Here is a fact unrelated to this little excursion: a local, small-time drone company stationed in the city listed its location and business hours on its website. It did not open on weekends until the clock struck late afternoon and no employees would come in early enough in the morning to discover that the electronic locks on its windows had been disabled and one of its stock had been fliched.)

Forte came here to see the ocean for no greater purpose than because it was _there_ and he had the time to spare and because he hadn’t seen it before with his own eyes and in his chest, simple curiosity can’t, wasn’t, hadn’t been fully rubbed away.

Even if it was smaller than the Undernet, it looked so... big.

 

He had been activated in a harborside town. In a building within a car drive’s distance of the ocean.

There hadn’t been an opportunity to take him down to the beach.

Standing in front of the viewscreen, Forte leaned back. His brow knitted, forehead wrinkling under the helm. The feed from the drone he had commandeered can convey visual and audio details: the way the slap of waves against each other replaced the electronic droning as a backdrop, the sunlight glittering on the water as the sun cleared the horizon. It fell flat on taste, temperature, texture. The air near the ocean in the human world would smell like salt on the tongue. It was autumn and the weather was cool. Would the water feel like the water rendered in cyberspace? Would the sand? Sand, stone, wind, heat, light, cold; things the cyberworld had, but did the human world’s equivalents match up to what a _NetNavi_ knew of them?

Peering at it through a screen couldn’t tell him.

Needless to say, it’s impossible to feel a lack if you never had anything like it to begin with. But there was room for questions.

The drone was directed back to the shoreline.

Forte flicked his wrist, snapping it to the side, and obligingly the drone sent itself spinning out of the sky and straight into a small cliffside: it ruptured upon impact, propellers snapping, lenses shattering. It whirred feebly.

The video feed to the viewscreen blurred, indistinct, colors splintering out, the landscape melting into static. The drone creaked; a heap of plastic and metal on the sand. Gray smoke steamed off it, then wafted away and vanished.

One overload of its systems later, it blew up and shrapnel littered the beach around it, sharp chucks of metal impaling themselves into the cliff.

The video feed in front of Forte cut off to black and blipped out. 

 

**.**

* * *

 

**25.**

**.**

Now.

Forte had an _appointment_ with an Under-ranker to attend to, and he intended to be punctual.

The Under-ranker in question didn’t know about the appointment just yet: but Forte would be more than delighted to enlighten them.

Forte sincerely hoped that they would put up a good fight. From there, he could move onto the next one.


	3. if the lungs do not give out before the heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the first time, Forte meets his match: said meeting doesn't proceed as he imagined it would. 
> 
> Notes: Several sections of the dialogue between Forte and Serenade are either paraphrased, or outright taken from either the Forte + Serenade manga side story. In unrelated news, my beta tells me I don't need to thank her in every chapter so I will instead imply my gratitude and admiration of her every _other_ chapter.

**̛̭̰̃2̛̛̰̭̭̰̃̃6̛̛̰̭̭̰̃̃.̛̰̭̃**

Forte lunged through the brawl, lashing out with fistfulls of energy and bare hands violently, deleting NetNavi after NetNavi in showers of data. Shrieking, NetNavis clutched at their depixelating limbs.

Blow by blow, Forte pulverized armor like it was paper.

He smashed one’s shoulder into pixels, its arm messily separating from socket, parts glowing uselessly as they dissolved, spun around, balancing on the balls of his feet and eviscerated another into two neat halves through the torso before the weakling program had finished its charge at him.

The _joy_ that was the battlefield; for a time, Forte was free to run wild on it.

Two more go down in nanoseconds, ripped in half, before he spun around and decapitated another idiot trying to ambush him from behind, its plating flying loose to expose the pixelating structure of the now-headless spine, another lost a leg, another was shredded into cubes of twisted bits, another goes spinning off to the side with its face viciously smashed in, leaking data.

Forte didn’t tire.

Unfortunately for the small mob that faced him, they did.

 

His surroundings went quiet again.

Data streamed upward in lazy swirls. He swept his gaze over the bodies, searching. It alighted on one still functioning; this insect, he knew, held the highest-numbered Rank among this sorry lot.

He strode closer.

As the dull thud of his footsteps approached in no special hurry, it stirred weakly. The glowing dots of its eyes in its cracked visor were the last parts of its body that could still move. Everything below the loose parts dangling out of its torso was destroyed. Both arms had been severed just below the elbow, strings of data unraveling; they spat pixels to no effect. Its voice buzzed heavily in its chest, riddled with static. It managed, “Are… Are you… the ‘Black Shadow’ who…. ravages the Undernet… ?”

That was a dull question. That doesn’t warrant a response.

Of course, the silence by itself was as good as an answer.

Forte set his boot against the Under-ranker’s helmet. It went still. The battle done, the snarl on Forte’s face had exchanged itself for a cold glare.

“Tell me.” He tapped his foot against the helmet, pitiless. “Where is the ‘Ruler of the Undernet?’”

The NetNavi fell silent, acutely aware of how easy for a creature like this, so much stronger than it, to carry through on the unspoken threat. Then, it blinked, arm-stumps trembling with the force of its own incredulity.

It had expected questions along the usual lines of _give me your Rank and acknowledge your defeat, where’s the next Rank above you hiding_ before deletion—it had asked such questions itself, back when it had dueled the old holder of its Rank for its position and won. It had revised those expectations when it had realized two days ago that on its group’s trail and catching up fast was a possible enemy that could not be beaten. A monster as was the likes of the Black Shadow (whom whispers that circulated the network had it lived solely for carnage—for carnage, for the purpose of destruction, who wandered the network in an endless search for the strong, who maimed and killed on a whim, who was incapable of things like mercy and compassion) but _this_!

 _This_!

This was a question nobody in their right mind would be so _conceited_ , so foolhardy enough to ask, not even the most unabashedly ambitious of the nine Under-rankers. And this one didn’t even have a Rank! The blind arrogance of it!

Despite its current predicament, the NetNavi boggled.

“You could not possibly… be thinking of... challenging the UnderRuler… could you!?” It got out. But of course, this creature was obviously a combat-model NetNavi. If he sought out the strong amidst the NetNavis in order to better challenge himself, this idea was a reasonable conclusion, that absurd desire taken to a logical extreme.

To challenge the strongest of them all.

The Under-ranker still couldn’t fathom it. “Give up…” it glitched. “Not even you… even you… would _never_ … stand a chance… against S… against the UnderRuler…!”

“Answer me!” There was a harshness to Forte’s voice, a purposeful, uncaring cruelty that spoke to a growing impatience for a lack of his demands being met.

The hairlines of faint cracks started etching a web across the NetNavi’s skull.

“I… I don’t know!” The NetNavi squeaked, desperate.

Pressing down harder, more cracks sprang forth under Forte’s heel, its frame creaking. The NetNavi could feel its _head_ starting to give away under the pressure and the cold rush of panic washed over it. Helpless, at the mercy of somebody stronger than it. It was the worst of all its fears, ones that had haunted it since the day it had set foot in the deepest cyberspace of the internet’s deserts. The NetNavi cried out weakly, pleadingly, “A navi like me… wouldn’t know!”

Forte did not stop.

The helmet pressed between the resistance of the ground and the boot groaned in a final appeal, the cracks rupturing open. Bright glimpses of circuit patterns showed through to the air. The visor snapped and slowly crumpled into itself. Still, Forte did not stop.

It was not wise to leave beaten opponents alive in the Undernet.

“He… h—HELP….”

The wind swallowed its cries.

 

**_Crack._**

 

“This is pointless…” Forte sighed, lifting his boot up and stalking away from the headless lump of pixels without sparing it even a single backwards glance.

He had chased down dozens of the NetNavis who’d sworn themselves to the Ranking system, butchering their followers and destroying their hideouts for months now. The Ranks they held he left lying where their former bearers had fallen, disinterested in claiming them for himself. He had no intent to enter the Ranking and no desire for a Rank, since holding one hardly granted any true power.

Doubtlessly some of the surviving pests would come inevitably creeping in with the rest of the salvagers once he had departed the area (they feared him too much to dream of daring come close otherwise) to take them up in turn anyway, and they would fall to squabbling amidst themselves quickly.

Some would die, unfit to maintain their new station. Challenged to a battle, defeated, deleted. Slaughtered by others in the dark. Some would live, thrive, re-shape their new position’s pickings to their liking.

But the violence as the balances of whom outranked whom re-aligned themselves in the new vacuum of power the deletion of the now-former Under-rankers would leave was not Forte’s concern. It was just a buzz of background noise.

The Under-rankers didn’t have the data he wanted.

He’d hoped the assault on their subjects would draw his true quarry out but that wasn’t _working_.

Behind the lip of his cloak, Forte’s eyebrows drew together. And since it wasn’t working, he had a hard time convincing himself that it was worth continuing to put in his time and effort when he could be doing other things.

“No matter how many Ranked Navis I kill, it seems that I’ll never get their attention.”

Briefly, a change in tactics, the thought of attacking the civilian residences on the upper levels of the Undernet, huddled around the public gateways to the surface network, bubbled up before he instantly and disdainfully dismissed it. As angry as Forte was, as much as he was filled with rancor and vitriol to the point where it curled in dark wisps around his hands, Forte had long ago found that he had no taste for attacking weaklings like that if they couldn’t even put up a _pretense_ of fighting back. If they couldn’t defend themselves, there was no sport in it. That too, would be pointless. It would be beneath him.

Forte made to walk away.

And as if to spite the black NetNavi’s resigned declaration, suddenly the network trembled.

A shockwave of light resounded through the hard-packed sands, a voice coming soundlessly to Forte’s audio receptors. The voice seemed to echo from all directions, a presence with no localized source.

 

_So cruel…_

 

Forte’s footsteps halted, stopping dead on the spot. The light from behind him threw out the long block of his shadow in sharp relief in front of him, stretching it out far across the rocks.

 

_— So this is how you do things._

 

Cloak whipping around his feet as he turned to face the source of the light, Forte raised an arm to guard his face, but even so, the heat, the _pressure_ of this presence burnt against him like the sun. It pushed down on him. Its billows stained the limits of the cyberspace around it. It was easy to recognize true power when he saw it, dense, intense and white-hot, and _this_ —the exposure to it alone made him see why lesser NetNavis would be driven to their knees in an instant. Feet braced a shoulder’s width apart, Forte held his ground, eyes watering.

The bright light distorted momentarily, then resolved itself into a clear figure.

Floating above, the overwhelming presence revealed itself to be a lithe, black-suited NetNavi shining with power on a magnitude that struck awe into any bystander. Two translucent pink raiments guarded their back, two pale, long tufts of hair framed their face, falling past their chest in length, and a ponytail curved up from the back of their polished helmet.

Golden armor pieces with brown lines (steady-looking and well-reinforced for combat, Forte noted from habit; whoever had programmed them had known what they were doing) gleamed on their arms, more armor clasped around their middle, their wiry limbs held loosely at their sides.

Dark eyes looked at him. The pressure receded like a tide rolling back into the ocean, pulling back inside the newcomer.

 

_The ‘Black Shadow’ who has been roaming the Undernet, destroying anyone in his path… Forte._

 

Triumphant, Forte’s face split with a shadowed, twisted smile behind the shade cast by his raised arm, eyes bright with fervor. “... I would have never thought _you_ would be the one to face me—Serenade!”

“What is it you want from me?” Serenade’s question was delivered coolly.  
  
Forte’s grin was a feral one, humorless. _What did he want from them?_ He said, “... Isn’t it obvious?”

He cleared the distance between them in the blink of an eye, and with sudden violence lunged for Serenade in the next second, aiming to crush their skull inward. “Your power!”

“I see.”

His hands jammed to a halt on either side of Serenade’s face like they’d been slammed into a steel wall, the impact jarring through him, his own momentum flung back against him. Serenade’s hands had closed far too feather-lightly around his wrists to hold him so.

The surprise of it made him freeze, unresisting, for a moment. His eyes widened. He struggled with renewed vigor seconds later, frantic, _furious_. He couldn’t move, couldn’t pull away; their grip is too crushingly strong. Arcs of electricity crackled across his fingertips, mere inches from Serenade’s face, so close the sparks lit their dark skin, but shunted aside.

They don’t budge an inch.

The corners of Serenade’s mouth pulled up in a smile, head tipped nonchalantly to the side.

“You _do_ have the GetAbility program.”

Disregarding his continuing struggle to twist away from them, they wrenched his hands down, away from their face. That earned a surprised hiss from Forte, feeling what passed for his tendons creaking and protesting.

Serenade was smiling still, insultingly undaunted.

“And you think to destroy me and use it to take _my_ strength, I see,” they said, leaning forward for a moment, much too close. “That’s ambitious.”

 _How_ was the first thought. How did they know, how did they stop him like that. The second thought comes a nanosecond after the first; _how dare you_ , and the third followed in its footsteps in a heartbeat of building, inhuman rage brimming on the brink of eruption _get your filthy hands off me._

They let go.

Forte jumped back out of range, circling around, abandoned the question of _how did they know what the GetAbility program was called_ and settled on the far more appealing question of _how long it would take to kill them_ , a question he usually favored solving with speedy annihilation of the problem at hand, then sprang for Serenade again, the ground dropping away below.

Undeterred, Serenade flickered out of the way of his rush, light on their feet and fluid in their movements. He whistled past and whipped around. Forte paused, giving them a tetchy glare, and chased after them.

No longer willing to content himself with those testing maneuvers, he spat several ugly words and swung downward at Serenade the instant he was inside punching range.

Serenade sidestepped his swipe a second time, and then the fight was on in earnest.

  

For the next few moments, they parried back and forth, Forte aggressively striking at Serenade who kept to a defense without flaws. He threw an uppercut, they dodged. He lashed out with a blow that have snapped their neck back on their shoulders had it landed, they ducked easily. They spun and pushed aside his onslaught of attacks one-handed, letting them glance harmlessly off a flat palm or a gauntlet, with such an easy grace they might as well have been brushing away a light breeze. 

One step ahead of every blow, every jab, effortlessly.

It was ridiculous, and Forte was _not_ going to let this shit fly—float. Whatever. He wasn’t having it, that was the important thing.

He just wanted Serenade to stop dodging, fight him head-on, and _die_ already, like everything he’d fought up until now did. That was how this was supposed to work! … barring the specifics of how the pests had squirmed under his boot prior.

Forte was livid at how this _had_ worked before, with other opponents. Lesser opponents, that was true, but why wasn’t it working _now_ ? It felt like he was tossing himself up against a steel wall, but well, that was no true reason to _stop_.

Was he still not strong enough?

They slammed together, sprang apart and circled one another once more, Serenade keeping pace, Forte looking for openings Serenade did not give him.

Was that it? Was that why his fists kept meeting empty air?

The thought burned.

Fury built up. He lunged forward again. They met, Serenade parried, he was forced back.

“I **will** become stronger!” He wasn’t talking to Serenade so much as he was gesticulating at top volume mid-fight in their general direction. “No matter how many battles it takes me!”

“Is that so?”

Serenade was clearly unimpressed, their former mirth nowhere to be seen. Almost bored, they blocked another attack from Forte. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

The question could nearly be mistaken as if it was referring to the on-going fight, but Forte knew what they were really asking.

“Until the day when my hunger, my thirst is satisfied—”

Infuriated with his inability to land a blow, Forte brought his hand back and molded that anger into physical energy, drawing forth power that was not of the darkness but his alone, dark and burning, in front of it. His power. His rage. In blind emotion, he slammed both forearms down in front of him, the surge of power instantaneously concentrating into a large sphere. It burst forward eagerly in answer to his command, separating into two crackling bolts and hurling for the other NetNavi, aiming to pin Serenade down on both sides and stop them from doing more of that _dodging_.

“—Until the day arrives when I have my revenge on humanity!”

Serenade pivoted on one heel, and with one sharp, seamless movement, caught the force of the blasts in their raiments. With a graceful spin, they arced the seized energy and sent it back with a _boom_ , straight for Forte. 

His eyes widened.

“What?”

_My attack’s been reflected?_

He tried to dart out of the way of the rebounding blasts barreling towards him, growing larger and larger as the distance decreased.

Too slow.

Damnit.

Forte let out a sharp cry when the blasts caught up and crashed into him, his own attacks turning his surroundings into a blur. He didn’t recollect himself in time to break his fall nor tuck himself into a ball to lessen the area of impact, and so slammed into the ground with a heavy _crack_ , tumbling head-over-heels for a good dozen meters, feeling parts of his cloak tearing off from skidding over the ground, and spending each meter _severely_ regretting obeying his kneejerk impulse to do something as thoughtless as turn his back and try to outspeed the blast.

While the dust and debris began to settle down, Forte fought to sit up, wincing and struggling to hold his frame upright.

Smoke curled off his cloak in faint wisps. Something sizzled hotly, broke off.

A damage report pinged to inform Forte that the internal data structure in his left foot was broken. His knee wasn’t much better off, and the less that was said of the right arm and his back that had taken the force behind the initial blow, the better. He tried to stand—his legs couldn’t hold his weight. Warning messages flashed across his vision, and he blinked them away. He had not been pushed into this kind of position for quite some time.

Years, even.

And you know what?

It pissed him off.

“No… not yet!” Small jolts of energy arced off him. Data flecked away from the fins on his helmet, pain pulsed from his back’s midsection; Forte ignored it. He ignored it because his pain was so trivial when compared to hurting the cause of it.

He had to get up.

If he didn’t. If he didn’t, he’d have lost. If he lost, Serenade, by all the unspoken laws of the Undernet, had the right to delete him. He couldn’t concede defeat, not yet, not here. Not now. Serenade should have only been—should only _be_ a stepping stone to his ultimate goal. He wouldn’t allow them to be more. He wouldn’t let Serenade delete him. He ground out forcibly, “My revenge… I can’t… I can’t let it end here!”

He wasn’t finished, he wasn’t _done_. He had sworn it. To pour so much effort into his quest only for him to fail here would be stupid beyond belief.

 _Pathetic_ beyond belief.

Forte refused to be pathetic.

His frame, deaf to Forte’s urging to overlook common sense in favor of pure willpower, helpfully pinged him back more warnings and another set of damage reports.

Serenade gazed down on him from where they floated. There was no uneasiness, no uncertainty on their smooth face, only a calm serenity, purposeful, firm. They didn’t feel even remotely threatened by Forte, not at his current level of strength. The upper hand was theirs now; they knew it, Forte knew it, however much he loathed to admit it. They pressed their advantage in the lull.

“Forte. I have not come here to fight.”

Serenade alighted down, light as a leaf on the wind, hovering a few centimeters above the ground; an invisible sphere of power gently blew away the debris around them. The breeze wafted against his brow, its cool fingers rippling across the cloak.

At their approach Forte strained to stand, only to collapse to the ground, landing heavily on his hands and knees. No. No, this wasn’t how it was supposed to _go_. He had to crane his neck back to maintain his furious eye contact with Serenade, teeth clenched, nostrils flared.

Oh. Serenade had brought an agenda of their own into this meeting.

Lovely.

If they weren’t here to fight him, Forte failed to see why they would take the time at all.

Maybe if they could be so _accommodating_ as to get back within range, he could seize the moment and swing his fist into their face so hard it would drive their nose back through their face. Maybe he could ram his fingers through their throat so deeply it would crumple before proceeding to rip out the strength he hungered for.

“I have come to show you a message from a person you know very well.” Serenade held out a hand, a blocky recording program popping up with a _blip_ above their palm.

A projection wavered into view, resolving into the features of a human face. Forte opened his mouth to vividly express his disgust for them at length, to spit insults, to sneer at Serenade; he had nobody but _himself_ he ‘knew very well,’ what did they—

_“My dear child. Please listen to my story.”_

 

—Forte felt like he’d been suckerpunched clean in the core. That voice. He _knew_ that voice.

Involuntarily, shock submerged Forte’s rage, every muscle locking into place. His fingers dug into the ground.

The years and the scar slashed across his chest had taught Forte to categorically ignore the memory of his creator. To think too long on that subject was still as appealing of an option as placing a hand to a hot iron. Don’t do it. Leave it safe in the past. Don’t dredge it up save on occasions reserved for stewing over how gravely the human race, how gravely his _creator_ had wronged him.

“... Doctor.... Cos… sack…”

But the name of that fraud comes back anyway, a thick, ugly knot in his throat.

Cossack started talking.

 _“I cannot ask you to forgive me,_ ” Cossack’s image on the projection closed his eyes, as if in... in… pain?

The human in the recording swallowed, mouth evidently gone dry, and Cossack’s image plowed on like each word the bastard was saying wasn’t shaking the foundation out from under Forte’s feet. _Again._

 _“But—”_ he rasped.

Was… Cossack leaking?

Forte blinked.

No, wait, in humans, when they leaked from their eyes, that was crying. He had forgotten about that. They had a word for it. Crying. Tears. Tears meant humans were... sad when they leaked them down their face. Were those unshed tears brimming at the rims of Cossack’s eyes? Taken off-guard, sensing the threat of being torn off his axis and sent careening into unknown territory, a sense of surreality gripped Forte.

 _I should be slamming my hands over my receptors_ , the sensible part of his mind gibbered, dimly aware it was being confronted with an unexpected threat. He shouldn’t be listening to a word out of his mouth.

Cossack was a liar and a monster, he’d lied to Forte every day of his life when he’d said he’d loved him, that he'd wished the best for him, with every gesture of kindness he had given him. None of that had spoken as loudly as the day he’d left him to deletion at the whims of the humans who had hated him without so much as a word of protest.

Because he had decided Forte was a failure too troublesome and too worthless to salvage, an experiment gone wrong. Because he’d gotten _bored_ of him. And Forte _would_ have died if he hadn’t acted to save himself, and that had hurt to know, hurt worse than anything in the world; that Cossack hadn’t cared about it, about _him_ , that it had been one long horrible lie Forte had been stupid enough to swallow. And for that, Forte wouldn’t forgive him.

Yet.

The human was saying he wasn’t asking for his forgiveness.

Then what did he want from him? He had to want _something_. Humans always did. There had to be an ulterior motive. What was this message about?

_“There is one thing you have to know.”_

He shouldn’t listen, hissed his better judgement, hissed bitter experience of what came of listening to his creator.

Hurt was all that ever came of it.

Yet Forte could only keep staring in shock, mute. He obeyed neither. The mere idea of attacking had fled his head together with all rational thought.

_“That day… When I removed the shields and freed you from Scilab’s containment, my plan was to plug you out and take you to a safe place.”_

In that moment Forte’s mind went blank.

Completely.

Sadness, misery, relief, spite, fear, hope; nothing came. Or maybe everything came in together and cancelled themselves out, Forte had no idea. He didn’t know what to feel. The emotions it sparked were too much to bear. He didn’t want them. He didn’t want _this_. He wanted to make Cossack’s voice go away. He wanted him to _shut up_.

The ground was gone, again. He was struggling to place it.

_“But as I was trying to access you, I was caught. They called me a traitor.”_

Forte heard the words, processed them, but it felt like they were being said to somebody else, not him; like Forte himself was standing off to the side, frozen, and watching the events unfold, separate from him.

It was disorienting.

Leaning forward, the man on the projection burst out, _“For a long time, people made me believe you were deleted…“_ Cossack’s image broke into a watery, hesitant smile. It confused Forte that the smile didn’t infuriate him. It confused him even more that he was confused to begin with. Something long dead and weak inside Forte spotted its first opportunity in a long time and crept up shakily towards the surface. _“How delighted I was when I learned this not to be so, when I learned_ — _when I knew you were alive… !”_

The projection flickered, shutting off.

Forte continued to stare at the space it had once taken up like he couldn’t fully process its disappearance, locked in place where he was crouched on his knees.

It felt like a circuit was misfiring inside his head.

Delighted?

Somebody was happy that he was alive?

 _Cossack_ was happy when he found out that he was alive?

Could Cossack have truly cared for him? Cared at least enough to want to take him to a safe place? Had he _not_ wanted him deleted for his disobedience? Was the reason he had not sought to contact him this whole time (which Forte had always taken as more confirmation of his creator’s contempt for him, as more evidence in a long case he had compiled against him and his wretched race) not apathy, but a case of being fed misinformation by others? Had he not meant for any of this to have happened?

The words replayed themselves in his memory banks. The self-reproach in Cossack’s voice. _For a long time, people made me believe you were deleted_.

Was Cossack… not the cruel man he’d knew him to be?

It seemed too absurd.

Did that mean his actions up until now were simply the results of similar misinformation? Had he been spurned onward by something as paltry as a mistake? Deliberate malice from Cossack was one thing. At least Forte could have ascribed meaning to that, at least he knew how to respond to that; but to have suffered, to have nearly been _killed_ because some stranger Forte cared nothing for had been _petty_...

A sick, tight feeling joined the knot clogging up his voice. Forte opened his mouth. Failed to form speech. Shut it again.

No.

No. No, it couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense. It _was_ absurd.

He wouldn’t accept this.

It wasn’t true!

Cossack had abandoned him!

_Cossack had betrayed him!_

He _knew_ that. He had been wronged and Cossack was the one at fault. He had to be. And for that wrong, there would be revenge. But. But.

He couldn’t—if that was true—it didn’t—it couldn’t be, it was foolishness to long for it to be truth but if it was—why? He. It was. This.

While Forte was busy staring at them dazed, Serenade curled their fingers shut, then open again, a small globe of light blooming into existence between them. Distantly, Forte recognized it as… it was...

… It was... a link?

They proffered it to Forte, hand open. Their smile was warm. “Forte… here’s a program Dr. Cossack told me to take care of. By using this, you will be able to plug out to Dr. Cossack’s PET.”

They floated closer, feet touching down on the sands. Smoke churned lazily around the two, swirling and laying low to the ground.

“Here, take it.”

Forte didn’t move.

Serenade’s voice softened.

“Take back your lost bond.”

Overcome, Forte ducked his head, looking downward for an instant.

“Bond…!” Forte repeated it quietly like the word was too small to encompass the feeling it brought up.

That was right, he’d had... a bond with somebody he had opened up to once. Only that one person and only that once. He hadn’t considered it lost; he had considered it discarded. He had thrown it aside as so much useless ballast that day and never looked back. The old, familiar pain in his chest flared hot at the thought, teetering on the verge of uncontrollable, suddenly too overpoweringly colossal to be kept inside, unhealed, only scarred over.

If he took it back. If Cossack was willing to take him back after all of this, after everything, surely the pain would go away. Surely he would fix it. But could he? Was that allowed?

(Surely the warmth Forte half-understood would come back.)

The soft, feeble something got to the cracks in his surface and spilled out into the open.

 _Could_ he go back?

“Will… I be...” Forte used his arms to inch forward over the ground, too stunned to try and waste time failing to muster up the coordination to stand.

(If he had any grip left on his composure, he would have been wracked with a furious shame that Serenade saw him so, so—uninhibited. But that would have required sparing focus for anything aside from the link and the man who said he was waiting on the other side of it.)

“… able to… return…” he bit the words out in pieces. There was still the sensation of somebody else propelling his limbs. The distance muffling Forte from the situation made thinking through his actions difficult. The metal of his leg-guards scraped against the sands as he pulled himself over to the other NetNavi. “To… that voice?”

Lurching upright from the crawl, he reached out a hand to the link. He found Serenade’s hand. His fingertips grazed the sphere of light.

“Now, plug out…” Serenade began gently, lighthearted.

 

And reality snapped back into focus, violently re-asserting itself.

The misfiring in his head disappeared, the numbness and the disorientation _gone_. Clarity returned with a jolt. Walls slammed back up into place. Forte’s face contorted, wiping away clean any trace of the unguarded vulnerability that briefly shone through.

Cossack had promised to protect him and when he had dared place his faith in him, _Cossack had not followed through_. His failure was betrayal enough.

Forte was through with leaving himself open to more of that.

What could Cossack—creator and human and father and traitor and human and family and _human_ —possibly offer him anymore that his hatred could not? Would Cossack give him the power he craved? Would Cossack take away the hunger that gnawed away at his belly? What need did Forte have of him? A weakling like that? What possible need could _he_ serve?

He had needed Cossack _then_.

But he’d shed that particular weakness a long time ago. Such pathetic emotions.

Cossack had made his choices.

Forte made his.

“I have no need for bonds anymore!” he snarled, jerked, and twists their hand hard enough in an unnatural direction he can hear the _snapcrunch_ of its internal data structure immediately breaking, yanking them closer. Fractures spidered outward from where their hands had been crushed together. The whites of Serenade’s eyes show, aghast. They jerked back. He didn’t release his grip, his arm jarring forward with their motion.

Finally a break in composure, finally an _opening_.

“The only thing I _need_ are the flames of hatred that fuel my power!” An undisguised mania had taken hold of Forte tightly now.

“Forte, don’t—”

Serenade saw the despair and the resentment and the bitterness and the raw and deep-set madness that festered as a fever would inside Forte, thick and hot, overriding everything else that attempted to smother it, the hatred for all humanity was and ever would be and all the NetNavis who sided with them, and understood:

Forte wasn’t going to turn back from his course.

“I have you now, Serenade!” Forte roared. “You can’t defend yourself this close!”

He drew his hand back, the energy whining shrilly as it collected itself.

“Now take _this_!” he slammed it forward and the energy he had accumulated in his hand detonated square against Serenade’s chest. Forte still hadn’t let go of Serenade’s hand, determined to give them no chance to pull free; Serenade threw up their free arm in self-defense and the following concussion deafening both of them, everything went a blinding white.

 

* * *

 

“Impossible…” Forte’s words did not sound so much angry as filled with incredulity, arm still outstretched, fingers still spread wide as the haze of debris and smoke swept clear. Grit tumbled downward.

“My close-ranged…” he began.

The redirected blast had torn away the left half of his mangled midsection altogether, eating away most of his stomach and taking out a massive chunk of his hip along the way, leaving his already-damaged legs to throw another barrage of error reports at him. Data particles leaked out and up in erratic patterns. The skin texture on the left side of his face had been blown off, the edges tattered, the left audio receptor reduced to a mass of cracked metal and glass encasing it; his jaw was no better, the exposed framework glowing purple and crumbling away into nothing.

Driven backwards a dozen meters and well out of his reach, Serenade righted themselves. They held a hand to their check, the scuff of dirt marring their skin, snippets of data breaking off. They took it away. Their raiments pixeled as they blurred with minor glitches, breaking into cubes at the edges for a handful of seconds before solidifying back to their normal curves.

Serenade was all but unscathed.

“It didn’t—” Forte blinked, not focusing on Serenade. His voice glitched. “My Earthbreaker attack didn’t even work…?”

The internal programs maintaining his capacity for flight started shutting down.

Power shunted itself off hurriedly towards the auto-recovery programs, already scrambling to patch Forte’s frame up. Forte wobbled midair, fighting in vain to stay aloft.

Then he fell.

The expression on Serenade’s face was so terribly, deliberately unreadable as Forte plummeted down. Twisting so he could see them, there was a short moment where Forte looked up at them with a smirk, rabid with hate, red eyes unwavering, eyes unblinking. Those eyes saw Serenade and they detested them in the same breath as they bitterly respected their might.

“You haven’t seen… the last of me… Serenade,” he promised, haltingly, defiant, barely holding himself together. “You’d do well... to remember… Someday... I will claim your power as my own… !”

And then the moment ended. Forte was gone, lost from sight to the immense darkness of the chasms in the wastelands the very clash between the two had torn open anew.

 

Silence settled down in the wake of their battle like a blanket over the rubble, thick enough to reach out and grab.

Alone, the single remaining figure hovered in the air wordlessly. Smoky tendrils curled around their feet.

The fingers on their broken hand twitched, the limb hanging limp at their side. Serenade held up their other hand, palm flat.

A static buzz sang out.

The bright shimmer flashed, casting a glow across their features and the pale pink outline of their raiments that curled over their shoulders, and dying, stuttering and blinking out a few seconds later. The brightness faded away. Forte had touched the link to Cossack’s PET, closing his hand around it. Yet his last blow had crushed it beyond usage. It no longer worked. They let their hand drop to their side to join the other one.

Wearily, Serenade’s shoulders slumped and they contemplated how to best break this news gently to Cossack.

They had been online for a long time.

It had still never given them joy to tell a parent of a cause to grieve for a creation even further. It was such a waste.

Serenade squared their shoulders, sighed, and turned to go. (There was nothing more to be done here. There was nothing more to be said for now.) Paused. They glanced down at the chasms far below their feet, the jagged sides receding down and down and down into the darkness. For a moment, the memory lingered and seemed to breathe back up at them from the depths.

 

_You haven’t seen the last of me._

 

No, Serenade had rather thought not. Forte hadn’t seemed the sort to swallow a loss without a word.


End file.
